A shared responsibility paradigm is available in the AWS cloud. AWS is in charge of cloud security for its own infrastructure, while your company is in charge of protecting your data and workloads.
To assist you with implementing your organization’s security rules, Amazon offers a variety of security functionalities, including encryption, key management, and identity and access management (IAM).
Compliance standards and laws are another key part of security, as a miscalculation here can be costly to your company. Almost all world compliance standards have been certified for Amazon’s infrastructure.
However, this does not guarantee that the workloads deployed on Amazon are compliant. You must be aware of your compliance responsibilities and use Amazon’s tools to enforce the applicable security and privacy measures. In this article, we’ll look at two security services offered by Amazon. These are AWS inspector and AWS GuardDuty.
What is AWS Inspector?
Amazon Inspector is an effective automated assessment service that assists AWS clients in improving their application’s security and compliance. Amazon Inspector scans apps for vulnerabilities and breaches from standard practices, generating a report of security concerns.
Each EC2 instance undergoes an Amazon Inspector Assessment to ensure that security best practices are followed. AWS Inspector is a tag-based and agent-based security evaluation solution from Amazon Web Services. To find Assessment targets, the Assessment template searches for EC2 instances with certain tags.
When to choose AWS Inspector?
AWS Inspector is an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) that aids in the detection of application vulnerabilities. It merely detects and provides you with an assessment report; you must take care of the prevention on your own. It generates a report on how susceptible your application is.
If you suspect memory leaks in your application, AWS Inspector can assist you in determining this. If you discover that data in transit is not encrypted, you can utilize this service to figure out why. AWS Inspector is also the best solution to use if you want to examine network configurations to determine EC2 instance accessibility.
How AWS Inspector Works
Amazon Inspector conducts an automated examination and delivers results reports with recommendations for environmental protection. To utilize this service, you must first define an AWS collection that contains all of the resources required for the application to be completed and tested.
The security practices are then added and implemented. You can also choose the timeframe of the inspection, which can range from 15 minutes to 12 hours or even a full day.
In turn, what is an AWS inspector agent?
The Amazon Inspector agent is a program that collects and monitors an Amazon EC2 instance’s behavioral data (such as network configuration, file system security, and process activity).
AWS Inspector Advantages
Amazon Inspector is a safe and dependable solution that we may use to secure our services, deployed apps, and other systems. It’s a managed and automated service. Let’s take a look at some of AWS Inspector’s most important features.
- Automated Service: AWS Inspector is an automated service that improves the security of your application in the AWS cloud. It has the ability to repair itself without the involvement of human resources.
- Regular Security Monitoring: Amazon Inspector aids in the detection of security flaws in applications, as well as deviations from security best practices, both before they are deployed and while they are running in production. This enhances the security of your AWS-hosted applications in general.
- Make use of AWS’s security know-how: AWS Inspector has a knowledge base with a large number of rules that are aligned with industry best practices and vulnerability definitions. It makes use of AWS’s Security Expertise, which is regularly updated with the latest security best practices and policies, allowing users to have the best of both worlds.
- Integrate security into DevOps: AWS Inspector is an API-based utility that examines your AWS account’s network setup. It also makes use of an optional agent for EC2 instance visibility. The agent makes it simple to integrate Inspector assessments into your existing DevOps process, giving both development and operations teams the tools they need to make security assessments an important part of the deployment process.
Introducing GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty is simply a service that detects possible intrusions and scans for harmful activity and unlawful conduct to protect your AWS accounts and workloads.
It detects unexpected and potentially unauthorized and malicious activities in your AWS environment using threat intelligence feeds, such as lists of harmful IPs and domains, and Machine Learning.
When should Amazon GuardDuty be used?
Amazon GuardDuty is an intrusion detection service that can help with things like privilege escalations, exposed passwords, and contact with harmful URLs, IPs, or domains.
Amazon GuardDuty is the best tool to utilize if you want to detect compromised EC2 instances running malware or mining bitcoin, unauthorized infrastructure installations such as instances launched in a region that has never been used, password policy changes, strange API calls, and so on.
Amazon GuardDuty can be enabled without the need to install or maintain any software or hardware.
Amazon GuardDuty is the tool of choice for monitoring traffic and detecting irregularities. It’s a service that doesn’t require agents, which uses machine learning and behavior models to evaluate a wide range of data, including network traffic, S3 visits, and AWS API calls to spot malicious activities like unusual access to data, credential compromises, cryptocurrency mining, as well as interactions with known malicious entities.
The moment any suspicious activity is detected, GuardDuty even allows for automated mitigation. Although Amazon GuardDuty is not a standalone Cloud Workload Protection Platform, it is a good supplement to an agent-based CWPP solution.
How AWS GuardDuty Works
GuardDuty makes use of AWS’s scale and breadth to detect malicious activities in your network. It’s a basic concept with a lot of upsides. Your assets and services are visible to you as a company. Amazon, as a provider, has visibility into network services as well as all of its customers’ networks.
Amazon has been able to use this technology to analyze, forecast, and prevent massive volumes of hostile cyber activity. It’s difficult to see the forest from the trees, and GuardDuty is your satellite, courtesy of AWS.
Basic Features of AWS Inspector and AWS GuardDuty
AWS Inspector Key Features
- It is a regional service that operates at the regional level. It is a one-click service that does not require any further software to be installed.
- It begins scanning as soon as it is enabled — There’s no need to look back in time.
- It checks for actions such as reconnaissance, compromised accounts or instances, and strange activity.
AWS GuardDuty Key Features
- It is a regional service that operates at the regional level. It is a one-click service that does not require any further software to be installed.
- It begins scanning as soon as it is enabled — There’s no need to look back in time.
- It checks for actions such as reconnaissance, compromised accounts or instances, and strange activity.
Difference between AWS Inspector vs. GuardDuty
| Context | Amazon GuardDuty | Amazon Inspector |
| Drive | Using intelligent threat detection, you can monitor and safeguard your AWS accounts. | Vulnerability management for EC2 and ECR is automatic and continuous in your AWS account. |
| Free Trial | It is free to use for 30 days. | It is free to use for the first 15 days. |
| Agent Installation | GuardDuty may be turned on with a simple click, and there is no need to install any agents. | To execute agent-based scans, you may need to install Agent on your EC2. |
| Use cases | – To evaluate obtained log during cyber threat events or attacks to minimize if any serious risk – To grasp event specifics what precisely happens while AWS services are running | – Open flaws or security gaps are investigated. – To determine whether security concerns have been mitigated or remain unaffected. |
Conclusion
AWS inspector and GuardDuty are managed security services which aid in the protection of your AWS cloud environment. It’s better to use both of these services together for a stronger security posture.